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If you missed it this weekend, the least surprising news of the Trump transition continues to be the Office of Government Ethics' struggles to convince anyone on Donald Trump's team to give a damn about ethics.
Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub emailed Trump aides in November to lament that despite his office's repeated outreach, "we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election."
As the office attempted to explain to Trump's staff, giving a damn about Ethics, the office, is important because they're the ones who will be vetting Trump picks to ensure there are no financial improprieties or conflicts of interest—presuming anybody in Senate leadership still cares about such things, of course. And because so many of Trump's nominees have no prior government experience, those nominees stand a very good chance of ending up in jail for breaking laws that they didn't even know existed.
The perils for White House staff were even more severe, Shaub argued, because they might begin their jobs without crucial ethics guidance, raising a risk of inadvertently breaking federal rules.
"They run the risk of having inadvertently violated the criminal conflicts of interest restriction at 18 USC 208," Shaub wrote, citing a federal conflicts law in an email to Trump Transition aide Sean Doocey.
There's no word that any of this has been resolved since November.
Trump is still making low grunting noises about blind trusts that aren't blind, none of his nominees have had the proper vetting completed, and as we write this the Trump team is confirming that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will be given a White House post despite there being a law seemingly barring Trump from doing exactly that. (Trump's obsession with surrounding himself with family members during important meetings likely stems from his own incapacity to process and remember information, as evidenced every single time he opens his mouth. Prove us wrong, Donald!)
None of these ethical concerns are going to just go away. It doesn't matter if Trump ignores them. It doesn't matter if Republicans ignore them. Trump ignoring ethical rules before his inauguration simply means all the conflicts are going to be hashed out after he's already in office, turning what are now only "conflicts" into, a few weeks from now, violations of federal law.
Won't that be fun.